Increasingly youth workers in the UK and Sweden are positioned between the multiple demands of municipal
organisations and young people. Through data gained from interviews with youth work practitioners this article explores how workers manage these positions of hybridity. Extending Goffman’s brief discussion of the relation between “team”, here being the organisation and municipality, and “clique”, here being young people, we suggest a third orientation, mediating between team and clique. Within this orientation we found three mediative approaches: unifying mediators, innovative mediators and manipulative mediators. We also found that unifying mediators tend to reproduce past relations and regimes, innovative mediators tend to produce new relations while manipulative mediators are often revealed at cost to the worker